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A Florida woman whose mother may have been taken from a Cree family during the Sixties Scoop is searching for answers for herself and her mom.

Amanda Willette's mother was born Mary Salt in 1956 and adopted at the age of five or six through a Catholic agency believed to be in the Toronto area.
Vickie Fortunato/Mary Salt

vickie-fortunato-mary-salt.jpgVickie Fortunato was given the birth name Mary Salt in 1956. Salt is a common name in in the Quebec Cree community of Waskaganish. (submitted)

"I need to know what connects me to this earth," said Willette, who lives near Orlando with her wife and young son.

"There are so many things about myself that I just don't understand because I've always felt like someone without a home."

During the period known as the Sixties Scoop, between the 1960s and 1980s, the federal government estimates that more than 11,000 Indigenous children were taken from their families — often without their parents' consent — and placed with mostly non-native adoptive families.

Willette knows her mom was adopted with an older boy named William who grew up in the same family and had similar features. But she doesn't know if they were actually brother and sister, and the two are no longer in touch.

She also has an uncle she trusts who said her mother came from "French Canadian territory."

The Salt name is very common in the Quebec Cree community of Waskaganish, on the eastern shores of James Bay. Willette says a genealogist also told her to look around Parry Sound, Ont.

amanda-willette.jpgWillette wants to know where she comes from, but she also hopes to get information about her mother’s family for health reasons